Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Targets Children
Release date: 2011 / 247 pages
Synopsis (from the back cover): Childhood Under Siege reveals big business’ discovery of a new resource to be mined for profit — our children. A dystopian neglect, and hovernments that look the other way, it tells the chilling story of business’ plan to turn kids into obsessive and narcissistic mini-consumers, media addicts, pharmaceutical pill poppers, cheap and pliable workers, and chemical industry guinea pigs.
First Sentence: I remember vividly one hot summer night, sometime in the early 1970s, I think I was 12 or 13, when I escaped the cramped and humid hell of a Catskill bungalow (my extended family had met there for a ‘vacation’), and made my way to the ‘Teen Glow Ball Disco’ at the big hotel down the road.”
Review: Every parent–and consumer–should read Bakan’s work, which not only aims to protect children, but illuminates what “accountability” means in the U.S.
Bakan, who holds law degrees from Oxford and Harvard and wrote The Corporation, examines how the deregulation of industries as varied as pharmaceuticals, fast food, video games and environmental health has allowed “corporations… to incite and diminish fears in ways that serve their own purposes…. parents are systematically misinformed, and our fears channeled to serve the interests of… corporations rather than those of our children” Bakan explains how marketing aimed at kids has led to addictions to pet sites and video games, the current obesity epidemic, and exposure to BPA and other chemicals that are particularly hazardous for developing bodies.
While Bakan’s assertions are well-documented (he includes 85 pages of end notes), he believes we should never discount our own intuition to guide our decisions. Since “watch dogs” are dependent on the industries they monitor, he reminds us also to use common sense to guide our purchases. For example, the gaming industry may refuse to admit responsibility for an increase in school violence, but what benefit results from young, developing minds spending hours killing and mutilating humanlike avatars?
However, Bakan does not simply require his readers to rely on common sense; he provides a compelling, well-documented study into the ramifications of allowing corporations to dictate the nutrition, entertainment, education and medications our children are led to believe they “need.”
Interested in winning a free copy? Drop me a comment below and I will choose a lucky winner by the weekend! Thank you to Shelf Awareness for asking me to read and review this important work.
Looks interesting. Thanks for the giveaway.
Sounds like a good read. Thanks for the give-aways!
Want to read myself but have a friend who must read this. Sounds like a good discussion group topic. (So glad you’re safely moved)
Sounds fascinating. Thanks for the giveaway!
I’ll definitely have to read this one way or another, so thank you for giving away a copy and please enter me in the drawing!
It sounds like a must read and definitely a topic that our whole family can discuss. Thank you for the opportunity to win a copy.
Sounds interesting!
I would really like to read this book
As an instructor in early childhood development, I would very much like to read this book.
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